Posted
by
Soulskillon Saturday March 14, 2009 @10:23AM
from the pi-in-the-sky-legislation dept.

whitefox writes "The scoop from CNet is that 'The US House of Representatives on Wednesday approved a resolution introduced two days earlier that designates March 14, 2009 (3/14, get it?) as National Pi Day. It urges schools to take the opportunity to teach their students about Pi and "engage them about the study of mathematics."' The resolution is available online. I doubt it'll ever become a national holiday, but the Pi string in the article is pretty cool in a nerdy sort of way."

Troll? Perhaps the above comment could have done with a little more content, I don't see anything wrong with the implication that elected officials are wasting time and money on trivialities and showmanship.

If they really were keen to improve to state of mathematics, there are some very good things that they could do to start fixing some of the problems with the education system.

However, those things require action to be taken, and thus, responsibility for that action. It is easier for politicians to engage in this sort of political showmanship, because they look like they care about math, they get the political points for "doing something", and don't risk their actions working out not as well as planned (a risk everyone takes when they do anything) and exposing themselves to criticism from the opposition.

Politics is the art of being gutless while beating your chest as loudly as possible.

The more they occupy their time with frivolous stuff like this, the less time they have to plan their next rape of our rights and pocketbooks.

Methinks you underestimate their ability to multitask in such endeavors. They have been wasting time on frivolous stuff just as long as they have been raping our rights and pocketbooks. (Even with pi-related matters [wikipedia.org] for that matter, for over a century!)

For a variety of reasons, the number 2pi (6.2832...) works out much better as a fundamental constant than Pi, and it simplifies many mathematical formulas. The linked article suggests that 2pi be labeled a 'turn'; so in that sense, 90 degrees is a quarter-turn; etc. Surprisingly insightful.

So while the rest of you jump the gun, I'll be celebrating on June 28th.:)

I never get used to the MM/DD way of typing dates. If it wasn't for the sarcastic remark (3/14, get it?) I wouldn't have caught it. Unfortunately, we will never get a Pi day over here, as 3/14 doesn't exist. A sad day for the European lovers of Pi (a secret fraternity of which we do not speak)

That you can do more things with e. (a^x)' = (a^x)*ln(a) and every formula with the for a^x can be rewritten to an e power. Furthermore e^(i*g) = cos(g) + i*sin(g) and e is used extensively in calculating odds. Pi has its uses but isn't so omnipresent as e is.

In Europe (actually, most places outside the US) we write DD-MM-YYYY or similar (DD/MM/YYYY, DD.MM.YYYY etc). This seems more logical to me, as days are smaller than months, and months are smaller than years.In Japan, and in ISO date format, it's YYYY-MM-DD.

MM/DD makes more sense. How do you verbally say a date? Every person I know says "March fourteenth two thousand nine", not "fourteenth March two thousand nine".

Many years ago I found an article about how dates SHOULD be written. Since time is always largest to smallest, HH/MM/SS, dates should be formatted the same way. Likewise, UNIX time is the same way with the smaller values to the right and larger ones to the left.

Knowing all of this, and to be a slight pain, when I purchased my home I signed all dates

Euhm, there are more languages in the world than English, many of them also use dates; I say "veertien maart tweeduizend negen". Which makes 14/03/2009. Besides, this way, the smallest (day) comes first, then the bigger (month), then the biggest (year). There is a reason that ISO dates are yyyy-mm-dd (big-to-small), so they sort correctly.

Knowing all of this, and to be a slight pain, when I purchased my home I signed all dates in YY/MM/DD format. The mortgage company said that the person that had to review and file the paper work was going to be driven nuts;)

I will have to remember to do this when I buy a home, especially if the loan agent is as much a pain as my parents' loan agent was last time when he got impatient because they wanted to read the entire loan document prior to signing it.

I know just a few Europen languages, but here are some examples: "el 4 de julio", "4. juli" or "4th of July". We use either little endian (4th of July, 2009) or big endian (2009-07-04), but not middle endian (September 11th, 2001) like you do.

In Swedish you do say "fourteenth of march" ("fjortonde mars"), making 14/3 a natural way of expressing the date. I believe a number of other European languages use the same order.

We do sometimes use the order you describe of year-month-day, but only in forms and such when you actually express the whole thing, with year, leading zeros and all: 09-03-14 for 14th march, 2009 is fine, but 3-14 is not.

Actually, in some places they do say "fourteen March two thousand and nine." Either one is clear. It's using month numbers to represent names that creates problems.

The ISO 8601 recommends that interchange formats for date representations go from most significant to least significant, in which case NEITHER MM/DD/YYYY nor DD/MM/YYYY suffice. It should be YYYY-MM-DD. The UK convention is arguably consistent in that it goes from least to most significant, but then you're screwed when you try to add time bec

I, for one, welcome my legislatures' recognition of the irrational in government.

In formal English, the date has always been written out as "...on Saturday the fourteenth of March, two thousand nine, at three o'clock in the afternoon" (as in an invitation). Note that the year is a parenthetical phrase set off by commas. In less formal writing with the slash abbreviation this becomes "...on Sat 3/14, 2009, at 3:00 pm" which is a form that has been in use in the USA before there was a USA. So the further co

No. MM/DD/YY makes NO sense. Its not in any logical order. Write March 14th if you want. But shorthand should follow some logical pattern. smallest to largest is fine. If you did it biggest to smallest you would be sticking the year in front. Which unless you are talking about something long term doesn't really make sense. If I ask when is that meeting? dd/mm/yy makes the most sense. Also... you CAN say 'the 14th of March'

How do you verbally say a date? Every person I know says "March fourteenth two thousand nine", not "fourteenth March two thousand nine".

No actually I always say 14th March and I write it that way as well. That is how it is written and spoken in English. Even you Americans refer to the 4th of July and not July 4 so clearly you used to pronounce it that way but have somehow lost it over the years. So if you are speaking American you are probably correct (with the one exception) but when speaking/writing English the correct way is always 14th March 2009. If you don't knwo any English speakers then there is no reason for you to have known this

It's probably a personal problem, but the representation of dates has always confused me. Once I found out about the ISO format, I was like "That's it!" Now I only ever use ISO, because it's as close to self-explanatory as you can get - everybody knows it's not their native cultural format because it starts with the year, and if follows logically with the next smaller time measurement in each position. I'd like to see us forget all date formats but ISO.

Naw, not really. They should just make it like Mol Day, in October. Avogadro's Number is 6.02 x 10^23, so Mol Day is celebrated on 10/23 from 6:02 a.m. to 6:02 p.m.

You could celebrate Pi Day on 3/14 from 1:59 a.m. until 1:59 p.m. I suppose that means that children with late-afternoon math classes miss out, though. Maybe it could be like New Year's Eve and the kids are encouraged to spend the day preparing and then at 1:59 p.m. everybody shouts "Happy Pi Day!" and that's when the real [math] party starts.

If we are going to use the Gregorian calendar, then we should probably see what Europe knew about Pi in 1592. According to Pi History [wikipedia.org], there was no significant contribution to the understanding of Pi in Europe after Archimedes until Ludolph van Ceulen [wikipedia.org] came up with a 20-digit approximation, in 1596. I'm afraid he was 4 years to late for Pi day.

Good work on declaring a National Pi Day on 3/14, for whatever significance a Congress-designated "National * Day" has, but they had to do it when it falls on a Saturday? Methinks that schools won't do much to teach about Pi and math on a Saturday, and a lot of the significance of the date would be lost if they taught about it on Friday or Monday, neither of which are 3/14.

How about teaching children about all the ways mathematics is useful in the sciences, engineering, public policy making, risk analysis, investments etc. rather than advocating pointless numerology that makes "mathematicians" look more like deranged Pythagoreans who worship numbers?

Yes! God forbid anyone worry about the ratio of the circumference of a circle to it's diameter. That would never have any practical application. I mean, it's only the basis for every calculation involving angles or anything. No one ever uses anything other than rectangles and simple right triangles in engineering.

schools to instruct maths classes that "Pi is a theory, not a number", give equal time to all 10 alternatives of its last digit (the value of which they invited their critics to "simply prove") and make sure all books contain respective warnings as drafted by the Landover Education Board [landoverbaptist.org].

I wish they'd approve holidays for subcultural groups, like the "National Day of Slayer" (National Day of Prayer needed a counterpoint). It's for metalheads and anyone else who appreciates that Slayer is like Dvorak with balls.